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If the fashion industry has an award for heroes, Henrik Silvius should get a nomination.

Muscular dystrophy may confine the 22-year-old Dane to a wheelchair,
but that doesn’t stop him from diving into the crowded sea of fashion
blogging. Spending his days blurring the line between masculine and
feminine fashion norms, Silvius is luring hundreds of thousands of
enthusiastic readers to his Where Fashion Is Fashion Is blog.

At first blush, Silvius’ opinion on clothing might seem somewhat
eccentric. For instance, he’s been known to combine the flare of leopard
prints or fluffy furs with otherwise banal black men’s suit or a
printed t-shirt. He’s not afraid to sport a pair of thick gold
earrings, carry a Prada purse or sport a chunky bright necklace.

“A lot of men are afraid of looking too feminine or not getting the
standard of the macho ideal,” Silvius said in an email interview. “Come
on, we are living in 2013 and we’re way past the caveman style…in the
shallow world of fashion, I’m sure that clothes are the uniform with
which we conquer the world.”

Silvius may seem an unlikely candidate to conquer the world given his
lot in life. But he’s just one in an admirable cast of people with
disabilities to break into fashion. The BBC, for instance, ran a show in
2008 called “Britain’s Top Missing Model” that featured eight disabled women competing to win a fashion shoot in Marie Claire.

As a child, Silvius was not able to hang on tree limbs or kick soccer
balls in the yard. Instead, he was observing the world around him.

He’s had a long affair with sketchpads, allowing him to channel those observations into drawings.
The view from his wheelchair caused him to literally see the world
from a different perspective than everyone else; he always saw peoples’
clothes and bodies before he saw their faces.

“I don’t know if this is the reason why I started loving fashion,” he said in the interview. But, he is “glad it happened.”

Where Fashion is Fashion Is is a chronicle of carefully selected
outfits, landscapes and portraits reflecting his unique palette. Every
morning, he puts together hip or chic ensembles reflecting what he finds
picturesque that day. The closet includes second-hand sweaters, H&M
shirts, vintage shoes, Dior sunglasses, and a collection of Silvius
original designs.

He writes text to run alongside his fashion, with words often
inspiring readers to follow his lead. His exhortations can be as edgy as
saying “boys, grab your balls and wear that Versace bag.” At other
times, his writing can give intense insight into a man striving to
overcome the hurdles of muscular dystrophy.

“There needs to be a thought and a reason behind every single picture
or post,” he said. He usually publishes between two and ten posts a
month, and a friend serves as his photographer, snapping portraits of
Silvius wearing outfits in a variety of locales, spanning Copenhagen to
Paris.

In order to read some of the posts, non-Danish speakers will need to employ a translation service, like Google Translate.

Silvius has picked up stylist jobs and he’s documented major events
like the Copenhagen Fashion Week. His goal is to become a fashion
designer and people attracted to Silvius’ designs are likely going to
fashion-centric folks who long to avoid the basic.

For instance, when Silvius grew tired of his white Doc Martens shoes,
he “spiced them up” by attaching some homemade white, studded leather
fringes to them. In a recent interview with Visibility, a blog about
disabled fashion designers, he said “New Balance sneakers are the
invention of the devil and people wearing them should cut off their
feet. I don’t care how comfortable they might be.”

For now, Silvius says he loves his styling job and is still
developing his view on creativity. His future focus will likely remain
on men’s fashion because “it is a couple of steps behind women’s fashion
— we don’t have the same possibilities women have.”

That’s why he’s itching to “design menswear that has that little something ‘extra’ in the next couple of years.”

Eventually, we may see the Silvius brand hit shelves. For now, he’s
doing a lot of drawing, learning to work with different textiles and
fits and figuring out how to properly transfer his sketches to the
sewing board.

Gallaudet University, a college for the deaf and hard of hearing, has built a dormitory that caters to the unique needs of their students.

The building was designed in a collaboration between New York-based design firm LTL , Quinn Evans Architects, Sigal Construction and DeafSpace,
a campus initiative that developed a set of design guidelines that
takes into account the unique architectural needs of the deaf.

The DeafSpace architectural design elements addresses “five
major touch points between deaf experiences and the built environment:
space and proximity, sensory reach, mobility and proximity, light and
color, and finally acoustics.”

For example, stopping to open a door may interrupt conversations, so sliding doors are used instead.

Walls are painted in colors that cut glare, and the building
takes advantage of daylight, reducing the eyestrain associated with
communicating in sign language.

Amphitheaters are also designed to have perfect sight lines,
no matter where you sit, so you’ll always have a clear view of the
speaker’s hands.

The buildings also incorporate special acoustic panels and carpets to reduce ambient noise, to better accommodate students with hearing aids.

The “Pixel Painter,” as he has been anointed — or, better yet, just
Grandpa — is the subject of a inspiring viral video making waves online.

He served as a letter man, or typographer, his grandson Ryan Lasko says
in the video, working as a “graphic artist back when everything was
done by hand.” Ryan Lasko, who co-directed the eight-minute “Pixel
Painter” video, said the family bought Grandpa a computer 15 years ago
and showed him how to use Microsoft Paint.

“Once I did, he took off with it,” Ryan Lasko said. “It wasn’t until
years later that we realized how important this thing was to him.”

A condition called wet macular degeneration diminished Hal Lasko’s
eyesight to the point that he’s now legally blind. But, using big fonts
on the computer and “patience,” Lasko’s mastered Microsoft Paint and
started churning out impressive landscapes and animals in his unique,
extremely pixelated style.

“When I lost my eyesight, I thought my painting days were over,” Hal
Lasko explained. “The reason I’m using the computer is different because
I’m using it because it gives me the benefit of magnifying enough so
that my eyesight is good enough that I can still do it.”

And at 97 years old, he has no intention of stopping. The prolific
painter is still active and mentally sharp, and once he finishes a
painting, he goes to a print shop to make it a physical reality.

Hal Lasko tried more advanced and current painting programs but found he liked the simple Microsoft Paint the best.

“To conceive a painting, it was much easier to keep it simple,” he told NBC News. “I had had years to learn how to do this — so I just decided that this is my way. What I made was beautiful to me."

Those prints are available on his very own website
and sell for $98 each in honor of his impending 98th birthday. Because
he is a veteran of World War II, 10% of all sales goes to the Veterans
of Foreign Wars.
“You know it’s no longer work; it’s fun,” Grandpa said in the video.
“When I worked, I always had to do something to please the client … Now I
can do whatever I want!”

Two paintings were featured in an art exhibit at a local senior center in Ohio.

Even his family says the dedicated computer painter has no intention of
slowing down. Hal Lasko’s vibrancy is obvious in his every movement and
the joy he takes in his painting.

“I’ve never heard him complain about age or … talk about dying at all,”
Grandpa’s son, Ron Lasko, said in an emotional interview in the video.
“He doesn’t have that in him.”

Two years ago, film professor Will Lautzenheiser noticed a persistent
cramp in his leg. Within days he was comatose, his organs failing one
after the other as vicious strep bacteria swept through his body. He
ended up spending five months in a hospital Intensive Care Unit, and the
attack of necrotizing fasciitis — flesh-eating bacteria — cost him all
his limbs.

“The amputations have been, in a way, the grim apotheosis of my sense
of humor and sensibility before this,” he said. “My kind of gallows
humor is maybe uniquely suited to such an absurd and horrible situation.
And humor is a great way to be resilient — if you can’t laugh, you
weep.”

Humor is also a way of lightening up a very serious topic — say,
disability. The Americans with Disabilities Act, the landmark federal
law on the civil rights of disabled people, turned 23 this week, and to
mark the anniversary, the New England ADA Center
invited Will and three other comedians with disabilities for a public
“Laugh and Learn” panel to discuss being disabled and being funny.

Humor has historically been a way of dealing with difficult issues,
said Oce Harrison, the center’s project director, “and we’re also
feeling like we could all really use a laugh right now in Boston,
because of the marathon bombings, and every day in the paper there are
evildoings.”

I can’t imagine cracking a joke about a marathon victim’s injury — or
joshing as an outsider about the other panelists’ disabilities:
paraplegia, ADHD, Asperger’s. But this is something different: people
with disabilities laughing at the situations they find themselves in,
and at the world’s reaction to them, and thus making it OK for others to
laugh as well. It’s another way of “being seen,” and educating the
public, Harrison said.

(Beginning
2nd from left) Veronica Blackwell, Jack Hanke, Will Lautzenheiser and
Joe Genera made up the “Laugh And Learn: Comedians With Disabilities”
panel at the Institute for Human Centered Design. (Jesse Costa/WBUR)

In an interview before the panel, Lautzenheiser ran easily through
the amputee jokes that he heard long ago in the schoolyard: What do you
call a man with no arms and legs who’s by your door? Matt. Who’s in the
ocean? Bob. Who’s on the wall? Art.

He can tell those jokes to relax his audience, but he avoids certain
variants that don’t describe his own injury. “I can’t make fun of anyone
else who’s lost limbs,” he said. “But I’m entitled to make fun of my
own disability. And the situation — it’s a lot more absurd or ridiculous
than one might think, and the jokes are, day to day, practically
endless.”

In fact, Will’s amputee jokes began in the hospital, when the surgeon
told him that his deadened limbs would need to be cut off. He was a bit
loopy from medications, he recalls, but his response was “Well, it’s a
good thing I learned to play the violin when I did!”

The humor continued through the long hospital ordeal. “The basic
nature of the situation isn’t funny at all and wound care isn’t funny;
it’s really horrible and painful,” he said. “But if you can try to make
that process a little less stressful for everyone, that helps.”

And on it went after Will’s discharge. People would compliment his
wheelchair, and he’d respond: “Thanks. Cost me an arm and a leg!”

His quips aim to put people at ease. “Otherwise, they might just see
me as an object of pity,” he said. “It’s not common to have a
quadrilateral amputee just sort of around, and I really don’t feel that
way about myself. I certainly have a disability. There’s a lot I can’t
do. But I don’t want to be just thought of as a disabled person. I’m a
person who has a disability, or a person who’s in this particular
situation, but it hasn’t affected me that badly mentally, and I’m still
pretty much the same person I was before.”

A unique Facebook profile photo (Courtesy)

In the last few months, as Will has begun to bring his humor out into
the comedy world, that world hasn’t always been set up to receive him.
When he arrived for a gig at a Boston club in June, the stage was not
wheelchair-accessible — so he worked that into his act (Which also
included a friendly competition with his friend, Steve, over whose 2011
was a worse year: Steve had ended up living out of his car, but losing
all your limbs is a tough act to beat.)

The comedy performances help Will, he said — it’s important to “be
visible,” and becoming a character on stage allows him to air topics he
might not in normal life. His first comic monologue included some of the
best and worst things about being an amputee. On the good side:

“I don’t have to wash my hands after I pee.”

“I can have unique profile pictures on Facebook, that look like I’m eating my arm.”

On the bad side: “The worst thing about being an amputee is that you
can’t masturbate. I always have to ask someone else to lend a hand.
Actually, maybe that’s the best thing about being an amputee…”

People are curious about amputee life, Will said, and “the gruesome
reality of it is that I need help — even going to the bathroom. If I
didn’t have a bidet toilet, I’d be stuck. It was really absurd before my
partner and I got that installed. Thank goodness for the bidet —
independence in the bathroom!”

Will is still in intensive rehab, so he cannot return to teaching for
now; he formerly taught film production and screenwriting at Boston
University and had just started work at Montana State University when
the bacteria hit.

He cannot return to making films at this point either, he said, until
he can find an interface that would allow him to control a camera.

But comedy, he can do.

Not everyone finds him funny — in particular, Will’s identical twin
brother, who is now looking much less identical. “This is all too raw to
him,” Will said.

But his parents support his comedy. And he is hoping that his
day-to-day comic approach helps model the therapeutic uses of humor for
some of his new comrades in rehab: Boston Marathon bombing amputees.

“It’s OK to laugh,” he said. “The situation is ridiculous. I mean, amputation turns out to be — who knew?! — just ridiculously funny.”

Tuesday, July 16, 2013

Not all places are ideal to start off a Friday
night, so Richard Spiecker’s text message to his friends made the plans
clear. The time: 9 p.m. The location: Biergarten Haus on H Street NE.

The “where” was almost a foregone conclusion. Spiecker, a rising senior at Gallaudet University,
and the dozen or so friends who’d be joining him were all deaf. And
over the past decade, H Street has emerged as the city’s nexus of deaf
youth culture.

“It’s all about service,” Spiecker said in sign
language as his group entered the German brew pub. The bartender
immediately handed out menus and waited for each person to point to
their selection. Then, the bartender signed the price.

“They know
what to do here,” signed Spiecker, a stocky former midfielder on
Gallaudet’s soccer team, his hair recently shaved to a buzz cut.

When
businesses began sprouting up on H Street, they catered to a different
type of urban pioneer. Their earliest patrons in the mid-2000s were
students from nearby Gallaudet, who were tired of slogging to places
such as Adams Morgan, where bars had little idea of how to help them.

“They were the influx of college students that H Street needed to succeed,” said Jason Martin,
a co-owner of many H Street establishments, including the Rock &
Roll Hotel and Sticky Rice. For a time, “it was hard to get people over
to H Street because there wasn’t much public transportation and taxicabs
used to be scarce.”

The Gallaudet students, he said, really helped.

Now,
deaf waiters work at restaurants. People of all ages walk up and down
the street using American Sign Language, or ASL. Bartenders know the
sign for Jagermeister.

The simple accommodations fostered a sense
of belonging for the deaf community on a street that was evolving from
chicken-wing shops and shuttered funeral parlors to $12 cocktails and
indoor mini-golf.

Like many redeveloping communities, H Street has struggled to balance
the desires of older, black residents and its burgeoning young, white
population. The deaf culture of the street adds a deaf-hearing element
to this familiar tension, though progress is evident.

But for all
of the area’s success, some can’t help but wonder what will happen to
the deaf-friendly atmosphere as the area becomes even more popular.

“I’m hanging out there less and less,” Spiecker said. “It’s becoming too expensive.”

Still, Spiecker and his friends welcome the changing street that first welcomed them.

They
started their evening at Biergarten Haus for several reasons: There was
good lighting, so it was easier to sign to one another. The tables were
long, so conversations could be carried across the room. The beer was
cheap. (And none of them could hear the polka music that played
incessantly.)

Hearing customers largely left them alone, though
they drew a number of stares — and not necessarily because they were
deaf. Mostly athletes and sorority members, they were distractingly
attractive.

As Tenja Smith, 21, and her friend conversed in sign language about when — or if — D.C.’s streetcar
will ever start running, they caught the attention of a couple of guys
on the other side of the bar. The men started walking toward them,
noticed the signing and then stopped, concluding their pickup attempts
might be futile.
“Damn,” one of the men said to other. “All of a sudden, I wish I knew ASL.”

Gallaudet’s campus is diverse and varied — Spiecker’s friends are far from a representative sample — as more students are arriving to campus without proficiency in ASL.
But no one in Spiecker’s group used cochlear implants, which can
stimulate nerves to create a sense of sound, nor do they read one
another’s lips. Many went to deaf camp together or played against each
other in a deaf sports league.

Sometimes, hearing patrons will cozy up to one of the Gallaudet students and ask for a phone number using text messages.

It might yield a date or two, but it “never usually works out,” Spiecker signed. “They don’t speak our language.”

But
trips to H Street for the Gallaudet students are not ethnographic
forays to learn how hearing lives are lived. They’re about having fun
with friends.

“When I came to Gallaudet, I was fascinated by the
strong deaf culture here. Some people are very proud to be deaf. We all
support each other. We understand each other. We do the twitchy-nose
thing,” he added, speaking of a common gesture used to show agreement
with another deaf person.

For years, students received the same
message: Stay inside the campus bubble. The outside neighborhood was an
impoverished, dangerous place that never fully recovered from the 1968
riots.

The adventurous students went to Georgetown or Dupont
Circle, but most stayed within the dorms, said Fred Weiner, the
university’s community liaison, who was a freshman at Gallaudet in 1979.
And that was all right.

“But we have students today who want to
go out and be a part of the world,” said Weiner, even if they still
communicate among friends. So H Street is a selling point in the
competitive world of college recruitment.

The result has been an
unmistakable cultural footprint in one of the District’s hippest
neighborhoods. A few days before he went to Biergarten Haus, Spiecker
and a fellow student were trading tales at a pizza shop. Nur Abdulle
told the story of a panhandler who pulled a pen and paper out of his
pocket, then scribbled: “Do you have a dollar?”

Even the beggars
have adapted. The two were laughing when a staff member at H & Pizza
tapped Abdulle on the shoulder. “More water?” she signed.

Every person at H & Pizza is trained to learn basic signs:
“thank you,” “hello,” “pepperoni?” Michael Lastoria, the restaurant’s
co-owner, said he quickly realized those skills were needed to succeed.
His first eight customers were deaf.

Gallaudet staff members also
held weekend crash courses for business owners to learn about deaf
culture. They instructed the owners about etiquette, from always
carrying around a pen and paper to feeling comfortable with tapping deaf
people on the shoulder to get their attention.

“But there’s been
an interesting shift over the past five or six years,” Weiner signed. “A
lot of things happen to include deaf people in the neighborhood,
without our help. It’s taken a life of its own.”

The ultimate
dream goes beyond restaurateurs being courteous to customers. It is to
be able to use the street’s emergence as a way to create a sustainable,
deaf-friendly neighborhood in the nation’s capital.
That requires
creating more stable roots than a rotating cast of students every four
years, Weiner said. Six staff members have bought houses in the area
recently, and many students plan to stay in the neighborhood after they
graduate.

If a community establishes itself outside the
university, perhaps neighbors would learn how to sign to communicate
with other neighbors. Or their children could be taught ASL at school.

“There
could be so much more,” signed Derrick Behm, 22, a recent Gallaudet
graduate. “We have people working at restaurants, but we can own the
restaurants. We can invest in the neighborhood. This can get so much
deeper for us.”

Even now, there are signs of that cultural
exchange. At Biergarten Haus, Spiecker watched as Anthony Palmer, 22, a
Gallaudet quarterback, recounted his experience at a barbershop Spiecker
had recommended, which happened to be all-black. Both students are
white.

“I didn’t know what to do,” Palmer said. “They told me to come over, and it was all good. They gave me a good haircut.”

“It’s
the best,” Spiecker replied, twitching his nose. “Now I never want to
get my hair cut by anyone but a black barber on H Street.”

“I
don’t know if I ever want to leave D.C.,” Palmer added. “This is the
deaf community right here. The hearing world, it’s hard.”

Moments before off-duty Frederick County sheriff’s deputies tried to
force a young man with Down syndrome out of a movie theater — a move
that eventually led to his death — Robert Ethan Saylor’s 18-year-old aide warned them that he would “freak out” if they touched him.

“Next thing I know, there are I think three or four cops holding
Ethan, trying to put him in handcuffs,” the aide told authorities,
according to documents from the Frederick County Sheriff’s Department
obtained Monday by the Associated Press. “I heard Ethan screaming,
saying ‘ouch,’ ‘don’t touch me,’ ‘get off’ and crying. Next thing I hear
is nothing.”

The aide’s statement about what happened the day
Saylor (pictured) died is among a package of documents released to the Saylor
family’s attorney and the Associated Press by the sheriff’s department
detailing its criminal investigation. The 98-page incident report and
handwritten statements from 22 witnesses provide the most detailed
account yet of how Saylor, 26, went from wanting to watch a movie he
liked twice to dead from asphyxiation within minutes.

“I don’t
understand why it has taken this long to produce,” Joseph Espo, an
attorney for the family, said of the report Monday night. “We’re happy
that we finally have it.”

Before the documents were released, only the most basic details of what happened that January day were known.

The
three deputies — Lt. Scott Jewell, Sgt. Rich Rochford and Deputy 1st
Class James Harris — were working off-duty security jobs at the Westview
Promenade shopping center when they were called to the theater.

There,
they encountered Saylor, who had just watched “Zero Dark Thirty” with
his aide of three months and wanted to watch it again. He loved the
movie, the aide told authorities in a written statement: “Ethan even
clapped at the end.”

The aide, whose name was redacted from the
documents, said Saylor had a history of angry outbursts and had lost his
temper earlier that evening. As they stood outside the theater after
the movie, he began cursing and punched a storefront window, frightening
her, she wrote.

Advised over the phone by his mother and another
caregiver to give him a few minutes to calm down, the aide went to get
the car, leaving him in front of the theater, she told authorities. By
the time she returned, Saylor was in the theater, seated, and a manager
was telling her that he couldn’t watch the movie because he hadn’t paid
for a ticket.

“I explained, ‘Yes, we are having a little issue,
I’ll handle it. We just have to be patient,’ ” the aide wrote in her
statement. “Then a sheriff came and said, ‘Another show is starting. I
have to go get him out. I explained Ethan is (sic) Down syndrome.”

The aide said she advised the deputy to “wait it out.”

“Then
the sheriff went in and started talking to Ethan and Ethan was cursing
at him,” the woman wrote, adding that the officer threatened to arrest
Saylor. “I then said, ‘Please don’t touch him, he will freak out.’ ” An autopsy report said
that Saylor did not like to be touched and suddenly the deputies had
their hands on him. The 294-pound man flailed, cursed and cried for his
mother, according to witness accounts.

As the deputies tried to
restrain and lead Saylor from the theater, the four fell in a heap on a
slightly inclined ramp and, during a struggle, the deputies placed three
sets of handcuffs on him. When Saylor suddenly grew quiet and
unresponsive, the deputies removed the handcuffs and administered CPR.

The
Chief Medical Examiner’s Office in Baltimore ruled Saylor’s death a
homicide as a result of asphyxia. There was unexplained damage to his
larynx.

A witness said one of the deputies had a knee on Saylor’s back, but no one reported seeing the deputies touch Saylor’s neck.

When
the deputies couldn’t find a pulse, they removed the handcuffs and
started chest compressions until Saylor started breathing again, snoring
but unconscious, according to the documents. The aide was asked to
help.

“I tapped him and said, ‘Wake up, Ethan,’ ” she wrote.

In March, a Frederick County grand jury determined no charges were warranted against the deputies, who have since returned to their full duties. Afterward, none of the evidence
presented to the jury was made available to the family or public for
months, despite Freedom of Information Act requests. Instead, Daniel
Karp, an attorney for the sheriff’s office, said an internal affairs
investigation first had to be completed.

For Saylor’s family, that
meant not only did they have to mourn a young man who was known for
his all-encompassing hugs and his fascination with the police — they
were also left with more questions than answers.

“Why is my family still unable to read the statements of those who sat yards away from our Ethan that day?” Saylor’s sister, Emma Saylor, wrote in The Washington Post on June 14. “It has been several months now, and questions remain unanswered. For what reason?”

In
the months following Saylor’s death, representatives from the family
and advocacy groups met with the U.S. Department of Justice about the
case and called on Maryland officials to conduct an independent
investigation.

Karp said Monday that the internal affairs
investigation has been completed but that he couldn’t comment on any
specific findings.

“This matter has been investigated
thoroughly,” said Karp, who defends municipalities and public officials
in civil lawsuits. “It’s obviously a tragic and unfortunate incident,
but the deputies did nothing wrong.”

Espo said it is too early to discuss whether a civil lawsuit will be filed.

“First we’re going to read the report and then decide what, if anything, to do,” he said.

Saturday, July 13, 2013

Graphic novel artist Gerry Kissell and "Sons of Anarchy" actor Kurt
Yaeger aren't waiting for a greenlight from Hollywood to create a
physically disabled action hero -- they're teaming up to do it
themselves through Kickstarter.

Kissell, best known for his work with IDW Publishing ("Code Word:
Geronimo," "Iron Sky"), has turned to the crowdfunding website to raise $8,000 to produce and publish
"Vindicated, Inc," a graphic novel about a double-amputee Delta Force
soldier-turned-vigilante suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder.
Kissell hopes to produce a movie adaptation as soon as next year.

"This is going to be a film. It's gonna happen," Kissell told TheWrap. "Even if we choose not to use Kickstarter, we've got the backers."
Kissell wouldn't unveil any specifics about partners who have already
agreed to independently finance what he expects to be a $10 million
film. But he said multiple directors are already interested in the
project, including "Iron Sky" director Timo Vuorensola.

Yaeger (left) -- a real-life amputee who is lending his
likeness to the comic book character and is involved in the creative
process -- would star in the film adaptation as the elite soldier, who
wages war against Seattle's criminal underworld with a pair of
prosthetic limbs.

"I felt that Kurt would bring so much more believability to it, and I
did not want to have a person with nothing but green screen on their
legs playing the part," said Kissell, a former Army medic. "You're
shortchanging the audience, and you're also letting down the disabled
audience by having someone who has not experienced what they
experienced, as well. And Kurt brings that. And I think he owns the
character now."
Yaeger's physical appearance and experience as an amputee aren't his
only similarities with the character. The actor also suffers from PTSD,
but didn't always know it. He said he was traumatized by the motorcycle accident that cost him his left leg below the knee.

"Being an amputee has allowed me to work with a lot of military
veterans and organizations," Yaeger said. "By helping them, I realized I
was dealing with a little bit of PTSD from the motorcycle accident,
which I didn't realize I fully had. I just thought it was me losing my
mind a little bit."

"Vindicated" is carefully crafted by Kissell and his team of writers
-- all of whom are military veterans -- to portray a disabled soldier
living with PTSD as accurately and honestly as possible.

Readers, and
eventually viewers, will see the character go through therapy and
military medical board evaluations as he progresses toward recovery.
"I wanted to show people, for the first time, what a character would
be like who has it," Kissell said. "I really wanted to address what PTSD
is and not treat it like it's something that is dark and foreboding,
because it kind of has its funny moments in your life. But then there's a
dark side of PTSD, too… we're going to show both sides of it."

Kissell also hopes to show just how his "Vindicated" characters --
including two paraplegic veterans serving as the eyes and ears of the
vigilante operation -- would use their military skillset to take on
criminals and evade authorities. Dale Dye, the senior military advisor
on productions including "Platoon" and "Saving Private Ryan," is serving
as the technical consultant on both the graphic novel and the film.

While Kissell compares his complex crime fighter to "a modern
version" of Captain America, and cites Batman and The Punisher as
inspirations, his biggest influences are not superheroes.

"The reason I created a disabled veteran super hero was because, in
this world, the real world, the only real super heroes we have, no one
really notices," Kissell wrote on his Kickstarter campaign page. "This
was my attempt to shine a light on them."

Next to the adorable smiling face of a young boy read the words, "Let's wipe out cancer, diabetes and autism in his lifetime."

The
last item in that tagline -- "autism" -- is what got these Seattle
Children's Hospital ads pulled from King County Metro buses last Friday.

The
Autistic Self Advocacy Network's Washington state chapter (ASAN-WA)
organized an online campaign objecting to the ad's juxtaposition of
autism with illnesses such as cancer and diabetes.

"Autism is a
disability, but it is not a disease. It is not a life-threatening
illness," said Matt Young, co-leader of ASAN-WA. "The idea it's a state
to be wiped out has much negative impact on our lives."

ASAN is a
leading organization in the neurodiversity movement, which seeks
acceptance of autism as a variation in mental function rather than a
disorder to be cured.

The ad, and the reaction to it, highlight
differences in the autism community between neurodiversity advocates who
view autism as another way of being and other groups more focused on
finding a cure.

On Friday, Seattle Children's posted an official
statement on its Facebook page: "We are sorry for the hurt and anger
these ads have caused -- that was never their intent."

In an
interview Monday, Katharine Fitzgerald, director of marketing and health
promotion at Seattle Children's said: "It's been difficult because we
do so much to support children, teens, and families affected by autism
here at Seattle Children's, and we're doing amazing research at our
research institute." The hospital also has an Autism Center that
provides treatment and support for individuals with autism spectrum
disorders.

The bus ad was one of three created as part of a
$70,000 campaign to raise awareness for Seattle Children's Research
Institute. The language of the campaign is meant to reflect the "breadth
and depth" of the institute's research arm, according to Fitzgerald.
The campaign rolled out on Monday of last week. The ads are expected to
be replaced with a new version within the next two weeks.

Last
Tuesday evening, a member of ASAN-WA brought the ad to Young's
attention, and he contacted the hospital to lodge a complaint. Things
only picked up, Young said, when he wrote a blog post calling on others,
who like him have autism, to post on Seattle Children's Facebook page.

"Autistic
people such as myself do not need a cure, instead, we need people to
accept us for what we are and to celebrate our gifts as well as they
would celebrate anyone's," wrote Beth Ann Vosskuhler-Waleski on
Facebook, echoing the sentiments of several comments on the page.

How
to allocate money between finding a potential cure and helping autistic
individuals navigate their lives has divided autism advocacy groups.
Autism Speaks, one of the biggest national organizations, has been
criticized for devoting too much money to research aimed at eventually
eliminating autism.

"The funding priorities are drastically out of whack," Young said of ASAN-WA.

The
neurodiversity movement itself, which embraces the different abilities
of autistic individuals such as savants, has been criticized for being
less inclusive of low-functioning individuals who would most benefit
from effective treatment.

Mumbai-based Abuli Mamaji suffers
from Down's Syndrome, but that isn't stopping him from starring in a
forthcoming Bollywood film. Abuli will be playing a character close to his real self on screen. Director Nikhil Pherwani has cast him as a protagonist suffering from the illness, in his film tentatively titled Ahaan. While
films based on various illnesses have lately become popular in
Bollywood, this is probably the first time that a person suffering from a
condition has been cast to play the character on screen. "The
film is about a new beginning for Ahaan, the character played by Abuli.
The message I want to give through the unusual subject is that we
should not shun the special adults in our society," Nikhil said. The film also casts Adil Hussain of English Vinglish and Life Of Pi fame.

Hussain is cast as Ahaan's uncle Ozzy, who suffers from Obsessive Compulsive Disorder. A female lead will also be confirmed soon. Nikhil
met Abuli during his many visits to a special workshop centre in
Mumbai. Abuli, 34, seemed an outgoing and interactive person and the
filmmaker was curious to know about his life.

Wednesday, July 10, 2013

INDIANAPOLIS (AP) — A professor at an Indiana college says he has found film footage showing President Franklin Delano Roosevelt being pushed in his wheelchair, depicting a secret that was hidden from the public until after his death.

Ray Begovich,
a journalism professor at Franklin College south of Indianapolis, said
Tuesday he found the eight-second clip (http://bit.ly/12YW5Bp ) while
conducting unrelated research in the National Archives in College Park, Md. The National Archives
and the FDR Presidential Museum and Library couldn't say for certain if
other such footage exists but both said it is at least rare.

Roosevelt contracted polio in
1921 at age 39 and was unable to walk without leg braces or assistance.
During his four terms as president, Roosevelt often used a wheelchair in
private, but not for public appearances. News photographers cooperated
in concealing Roosevelt's disability, and those who did not found their
camera views blocked by Secret Service agents, according to the FDR Presidential Museum and Library's website.

"This raw film clip may be the first motion picture images of the
president in his wheelchair, and it was never meant to be shown to the
world," Begovich said.

Bob Clark, supervisory archivist at the Roosevelt library in New York, said he wasn't aware of any other similar film.

A spokeswoman for the National Archives concurred.

"With respect to whether or not this is the earliest or only existing
footage of FDR in a wheelchair, we cannot state that this is
definitively the case, although such footage is certainly rare," Laura
Diachenko said in an email.

The film shows Roosevelt visiting the U.S.S. Baltimore at Pearl
Harbor in July 1944. Eight seconds of the clip show Roosevelt exiting a
doorway on the ship and being escorted down what is apparently a ramp.
The wheelchair is not clearly visible because the view of the president
is screened by a line of sailors, but Roosevelt's distinctive white hat
can be seen gliding past the men at a lower level. Roosevelt, at
6-foot-2, was likely taller than most of the soldiers.

Although Roosevelt's disability was virtually a state secret during
his presidency, which spanned the Great Depression and most of World War
II, it has become an inspiration to advocates who successfully pushed
for a statue of him in his wheelchair to be added to the Roosevelt
Memorial in Washington.

"To me, the importance of this clip as historic media imagery is that
it reminds all of us that this president fought the Great Depression
and World War II from a wheelchair. I think it's a tragedy that we
haven't had many candidates for national office who use a wheelchair or
guide dog or sign language," Begovich said in a statement.

Saturday, July 6, 2013

DETROIT -- Beatrice Luckett (pictured), who is blind, goes online using software that
reads the text aloud to pay bills, send e-mails and browse sites for
medical remedies. But the 69-year-old woman said many sites are useless
to her because they don't work with the software.

"If there is no way of accessing the Internet, then we can't be involved," she said.

Court
decisions and new federal regulations expected this year could clear
the way for better access by disabled users to the Internet under the
federal Americans with Disabilities Act.

The ADA civil rights law,
which prohibits discrimination based on disability, was enacted in 1990
before the Internet boom. The law, among its many points, requires
accommodations be made in public areas for disabled people. In many
cases, lawyers say websites should be considered virtual public spaces
and operators forced to comply.

"Websites are the new frontier,"
said Brian G. Muse, a law partner with LeClairRyan in Williamsburg, Va.,
who specializes in defending ADA lawsuits.

Some companies, such
as NetFlix and Target, have already been sued and changed their
technology to give greater access. For example, NetFlix, an on-demand
video provider with tens of thousands of titles, has agreed to add
closed captioning so deaf people can read dialogue.

"Most
people don't think about it, and most people are not aware of it," said
Kathy Ossian, a Ferndale attorney who specializes in technology matters
and recently offered a seminar in metro Detroit on the issue. "But just
about everyone has a website, and just about everybody uses the Web."

Ossian
and others — including groups that have sued major companies to force
greater cyber-accessibility — are urging businesses to get ahead of new
rules expected soon from the U.S. Department of Justice. Ossian said
companies should consider how their sites can be used, for example, by
people who are blind, deaf or who can't use their hands and need strong
voice recognition capabilities.

In recent years, with the rise of
communications technology, there has been an increasing number of
lawsuits related to the Internet and ADA rules, said Marty Orlick, a
partner with Jeffer Mangels Butler & Mitchell in San Francisco. He
estimates about 16,000 ADA lawsuits have been filed nationally since
2000. Only a handful of those are directly related to websites, but
legal questions and cases in this area are likely to increase, he said.

Muse,
the Virginia lawyer, said new guidelines expected from the Justice
Department as early as this year will likely answer questions and help
resolve the few and conflicting court decisions thus far. The new rules
likely will broaden how the law applies to commercial sites and could
significantly increase the requirements for designing and running
websites.

"It's potentially a huge deal," Muse said. "I think the
best advice is to start thinking about it now. Don't wait until you
find out about it from a lawsuit."

In many cases, websites already
have functions that make them accessible, such as captioned photos and
basic coding so that a third-party software application can read text
aloud for blind people, said John Torres, an attorney and production
coordinator at the Web development firm Media Genesis in Troy.

But every additional feature also adds to the bottom line, Torres said. "It can get crazy as this law progresses."

Groups
representing people with disabilities say cost should not be an excuse.
Online accessibility, they say, is the right thing for companies to do.

"It's
absolutely essential," said John Pare, an executive director with the
National Federation of the Blind in Baltimore. "Otherwise blind people
would be blocked from getting the same educational opportunities and
employment opportunities as non-blind people."

The federation and
other groups have gone to court. The group sued Target in California in
2006, alleging that blind people could not use the Minneapolis-based
retailer's website. Target settled two years later after the court held
that the online store was a public accommodation. As part of the
agreement, the retailer set up a $6 million fund to settle claims.

Pare,
who is blind, said accessibility from site to site varies for the 1.3
million legally blind people in the U.S. who operate computers using
software applications that can read text and by using keyboard controls,
instead of a mouse, to navigate sites.

Last year, the National
Association of the Deaf, along with the Western Massachusetts
Association of the Deaf and Hearing-Impaired, settled a lawsuit against
Netflix in federal district court in Massachusetts.

The case
alleged Netflix violated the disabilities act by not closed-captioning
streamed video, preventing 48 million deaf and hard-of-hearing people
from using the service. To settle the case, Netflix agreed to add the
text to all of its content by 2014.

"Not only is it now the law,
but it makes good business sense to make websites fully accessible to
everyone," the association's director of communications Lizzie Sorkin
said via e-mail. "Why would any business make it hard for anyone to buy
their products or services?"

Tuesday, July 2, 2013

As many as 300 million people around the world need hearing aids. The
vast majority of the 7 million people who get them annually are in the
U.S. and Europe.

One big reason is cost. On average, a set of
hearing aids rings up a tab of about $4,000. Most insurance policies
don't cover them.

A company called is trying to do something
about the limited reach of hearing aids by creating a high-quality
hearing device that costs less than a tenth the normal price.

Stavros
Basseas is showing me around his development lab and hearing clinic in a
strip mall in suburban Chicago. Basseas began as an electrical engineer
in the hearing aid industry, but working with patients directly in this
small clinic helped him understand their needs more deeply.

"It
was not just an engineering project anymore," he says. "It had a human
face." Basseas says when people came to him for help he had a chance to
talk to them about the effects of hearing loss, especially the social
isolation most people experience.

But when they put on a new
hearing device, Basseas says patients react right away. "Sometimes they
cry, because it was like talking to their heart, because they know what
is happening," he says.

Wayne Jagusch, one of Basseas'
patients, knows the feeling. "It's terrible when you're with people and
you can't understand what they're saying," he says. "You sit there and
smile like an idiot and nod your head, and you don't know whether
they're saying something good or bad."

Years ago, Basseas
fitted Jagusch with top-quality hearing aids that cost thousands of
dollars. He brought them in for adjustment on the day I visited. But
Basseas also recently gave Jagusch a prototype of the $300 device the
company has developed. Jagusch likes it.

"This is the best I've
had so far, and I've gone through a bunch of different devices,"
Jagusch says. "I like the adjustability of it."

Besides cost,
one of the big hurdles to the use of hearing aids is the number of
visits required to get the devices adjusted properly. Sound World
Solutions addresses that problem by making its device adjustable through
a to a smartphone.

The app first gives the user a hearing test using an earpiece that
looks like a small Bluetooth phone receiver. Then the app sets the
device to compensate for your hearing loss. A user can also tweak the
device manually.

Basseas demonstrates.

"So, I have on
my ear the device, the CS10, and we are, at the same time, recording
whatever I hear in my ear," he says. "And the device is connected with
the smartphone, and I'm going to go through the sequence of customizing
the device. If I need a little bit more clarity, I can increase the
trebles, and so you can actually hear that the trebles are increased. Or
if I like to listen to music and I like a little more bass, then I
increase the bass."

The device also has presets that can be turned on and off without a smartphone.

Frank Lin,
a professor of public health and an ear surgeon at Johns Hopkins
University in Baltimore, says this kind of device provides a good
alternative for the millions of adults in the U.S. who have mild to
moderate hearing loss.

"You can get it mailed to you, you put
it in your ear, you program it yourself with your Android phone, and
it's going to be decent," Lin says. "Never as good as the gold standard,
of course, but a whole lot better than nothing."

Lin's
research shows the hearing loss is not just an irritant — it's a serious
public health problem. That's because hearing loss increases the
likelihood of declining physical, emotional and mental health.

"The
price point they're talking about is something that makes it a much
more affordable [device] — and more importantly, their approach toward
it makes it a much more accessible device," Lin says. He's planning to
use the Sound World Solutions device in his future research.

Lin
says another problem with the current market for hearing aids is that
the handful of companies that make them have a high-profit, low-volume
strategy. That's partly driven by the fact that each company uses its
own proprietary technology that costs lots of money to develop. Sound
World Solutions has taken another route — it uses mostly inexpensive
off-the-shelf Bluetooth technology for its device.

About Me

I am full-time Mass Communication faculty at Towson University in Maryland and adjunct faculty in the City University of New York (CUNY) Master's in Disability Studies program.
I research media and disability issues and wrote a 2010 book on the subject: Representing Disability in an Ableist World: Essays on Mass Media, published by Advocado Press.
The media have real power to define what the public knows about disability and that's what I research.